The Abbé’s Completed Italian Monarchy Manuscript
At Dantès’s request to see the great work on the monarchy of Italy, the Abbé produces three or four rolls of linen, layered like papyrus folds. The rolls consist of cloth slips about four inches wide and eighteen inches long, carefully numbered and covered with legible Italian writing, a language Dantès understands as a Provençal. The Abbé notes he wrote “finis” at the end of the sixty-eighth strip about a week earlier, having torn up two shirts and as many handkerchiefs to complete the manuscript.
The Abbé’s Handmade Writing Tools
The Abbé shows Dantès the slender, six-inch writing stick resembling a fine painting-brush handle, to which a cartilage point is tied with thread and split at the nib like an ordinary pen. He then displays the penknife with which it was shaped, a razor-sharp blade he fashioned from an old iron candlestick, along with a larger knife that can both cut and thrust. Dantès examines these tools with the same wonder he once felt viewing curiosities from the South Seas in Marseilles shops.
The Abbé’s Self-Made Ink and Lighting Supplies
The Abbé explains how he obtains ink only as needed and reveals that he also worked at night, despite lacking cat-like vision. Demonstrating his resourcefulness, he shows the lamp he made by separating fat from his meat rations and melting it into oil, producing a torch similar to those used in public illuminations. For ignition, he uses two flints with a piece of burnt linen, and he procured sulphur by feigning a skin disorder.
Revealing the Concealed Cord Ladder
Declaring that he did not trust all his treasures in the same hiding place, the Abbé shuts the first cavity, sprinkles dust over it to conceal signs of disturbance, and rubs it smooth. He then moves his bed to reveal a second hidden space behind its head, containing a cord ladder between twenty-five and thirty feet long that Dantès finds firm and strong enough to bear weight. The Abbé explains the ladder was crafted from threads torn from shirts and ripped from bed sheet seams during his three years at Fenestrelle, then brought to the Château d’If.
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